Don’t get conned by the spread-betting scam

There may be some honest spread-betting companies. There may even be people who can make money spread betting. But my experience investigating spread betting while writing Pillaged suggests that spread betting is a massively profitable scam. When writing Pillaged, I opened several practise spread-betting accounts. These allow you to learn how to do spread betting without risking real money. Over two months, I managed to lose about £30,000. Luckily it was not real money. However, this did let me find a way to regularly win.

So I decided to take the plunge and open a real spread-betting account. Although I made many losing bets, I managed to close these before my losses got too large and so for two weeks, by carefully controlling my losses and by making larger winning bets I won between £50 and £100 a day every single day. But after I had pocketed about £1,000 things suddenly went horribly wrong. I got into several losing bets and found that I couldn’t close the bets, so my losses were much higher than they should have been. At first the spread-betting company denied there was anything wrong and suggested there must be problems with my Internet connections. But when I provided evidence proving that it was the spread-betting company which was preventing me closing losing bets, one customer service employee admitted the truth – the spread-betting computer system was deliberately blocking me when I made losing bets because the spread-betting company considered that I was betting in a way which was “unfair”.

So there you have it – if you lose while spread betting, the companies will happily take your money. But if you find a way to win regularly – even just small amounts – the company cheats to make you lose. The whole thing is a con. Don’t get robbed by spread-betting firms.